1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to enterprise service architecture, and more specifically to simplifying determination of dependencies among service oriented architecture (SOA) services.
2. Related Art
Computing environments are often implemented based on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). In a SOA environment, server systems (in general, provider systems) provide a set of services (referred to as “SOA services”) which can be invoked by other consumer systems via a network using well defined protocols such as SOAP over Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).
SOA services are defined by a corresponding contract, which specifies input/output parameters of the service, the type of the parameters, the format of invoking the service (sending the request), the format of the response, etc. The contract is specified in a structured format such as extensible markup language (XML), which makes the content machine-understandable. As is well known, the contracts for SOA services are often specified according to Web Service Definition Language (WSDL).
Client/consumer systems can request contracts of desired SOA services and then invoke the SOA services according to the received specification. In general, a client/consumer system invokes one or more services (to perform desired tasks on or using the provider systems) and receives corresponding responses.
There is a general need to determine the dependencies among the SOA services present in a SOA environment. For example, dependencies may need to be determined to identify bottlenecks, cyclic dependencies and missing services during the design of the SOA services. Such dependency information may also facilitate a user/developer to determine the impact of a change in the implementation/contract of a specific SOA service on the other SOA services in the environment.
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